Jean Cocteau Quotes

Jean Cocteau Quotes. Below is a collection of famous Jean Cocteau quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by Jean Cocteau. Share these quotations with your friends and family.

The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

By Jean Cocteau
Life is a horizontal fall.

By Jean Cocteau
The extreme limit of wisdom --that's what the public calls madness.

By Jean Cocteau
A little too much is just enough.

By Jean Cocteau
Tact in audacity consists in knowing how far we may go too far.

By Jean Cocteau
Tact is knowing how far to go too far.

By Jean Cocteau
It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

By Jean Cocteau
If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.

By Jean Cocteau
If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.

By Jean Cocteau
Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

By Jean Cocteau
Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.

By Jean Cocteau
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

By Jean Cocteau
The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.

By Jean Cocteau
The Louver is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.

By Jean Cocteau
Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.

By Jean Cocteau
All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

By Jean Cocteau
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

By Jean Cocteau
Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

By Jean Cocteau
Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.

By Jean Cocteau
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

By Jean Cocteau
A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.

By Jean Cocteau
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like

By Jean Cocteau
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

By Jean Cocteau
The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head.

By Jean Cocteau
The extreme limit of wisdom-- that is what the public calls madness.

By Jean Cocteau
The extreme limit of wisdom--that is what the public calls madness.

By Jean Cocteau
The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizzare which seems inherent in them.

By Jean Cocteau
Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.

By Jean Cocteau
Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.

By Jean Cocteau
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.

By Jean Cocteau